In the outer corridor, which she did not remember having passed through last night, she held out her hand. Lawrence gave her the key; she slipped it down the neck of her muslin frock, and it struck a chill through her bosom.
When the ship had carried him away she returned uptown and took a train for Long Island.
CHAPTER XII
Aunt Althea lay in a four-post bed near a window through which she might see the sunshine resting on the small Italian garden. Her colorless face was stamped with a look of almost infantile acquiescence, though it was only three days since she had sat out there in the garden, thinking:
"When Lilla comes back I'll ask her whether she wouldn't like a little run over to Rome, before the season sets in."
The sick woman tell asleep. Her hair appeared grayer, her skin more nearly transparent, than ordinarily. All her various ardors had not slipped away from her without leaving on her countenance the marks of their transmutation, a peculiar nobility that owed half its fineness to unacknowledged suffering.
In the night the nurse decided to wake the physician, who was dozing in one of the guest rooms. Aunt Althea had conquered time, had regained her "beloved Europe." Somewhere in the New York house there was a photograph of her, taken in her twenty-fifth year. She, too, it seemed, had once been charming, full of young grace and eager expectancy. And now she was in her twenty-fifth year again, and driving through Rome to the English cemetery. She reached it. She met some one there, to whom she spoke in Italian. It was a rendezvous of lovers. And Lilla heard the sigh:
"Don't go. Don't smile at my intuition——"
Later, after seeming to listen intently, Aunt Althea cried: